Animal research on biomusicality, which looks at whether different species are capable of  behaving in ways that show they recognize aspects of music, including rhythm and beat, remains a tantalizing field at the intersection of biology and psychology. Now, the highly trained California sea lion at UC Santa Cruz who achieved global fame for her ability to bob her head to a beat is finally back: starring in a new study that shows her rhythm is just as precise—if not better—than humans.

Corn, or maize, is a major crop in the United States, and its derivatives are utilized in practically every facet of our lives. Demand for it grows, even as unpredictable environmental conditions make it difficult for farmers to maintain their current yield. In work recently published in the journal In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology – Plant, labs from the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) and Iowa State University (ISU) partnered with scientists from Corteva Agriscience to establish a more accessible method for maize bioengineering that will pave the way for improving this critical crop.

BUFFALO, NY — May 1, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Aging (Aging-US) on April 2, 2025, as the cover of Volume 17, Issue 4, titled “Decreased mitochondrial NAD+ in WRN deficient cells links to dysfunctional proliferation.”

University of Tennessee Professor Paul Armsworth, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, among its cohort of 2025 ESA Fellows.

Cells have a mailing system of sorts. They can release tiny molecular balls, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), that contain biological matter or messages and attach to other cells to share whatever they contain. In cancer, EVs often depart from tumor cells to seed the cancer elsewhere in the body, leading to metastasis. However, how the EVs connected to recipient cells to deliver their payload has remained a mystery — until now. A team of researchers based in Japan has revealed the molecular mechanisms underpinning the process for small EVs (sEVs), which they said could have implications for developing better cancer treatments.